News

KPhotoAlbum 5.4 released

We are pleased to announce the new release 5.4 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management software!

Please consider that we dropped support for older Qt versions with this release. You will need at least Qt 5.8 to build KPA now.

Another notable change is that FreeBSD is now also a supported platform of KPA.

New developer

We're especially delighted to welcome a new KPA developer: Robert Krawitz. He supplied us with meaningful patches for quite some time now, and finally decided to really step in now. For v5.4, he contributed and changed a lot of code touching complicated parts of KPA, mostly, the changes were about optimizing code, speeding it up and removing unneeded or obsolete parts.

Kudos for this! We hope to have another long-term developer with Robert now. Welcome to the team :-)

A selection of improvements and speedups in version 5.4 follows:

Insert Exif data for each loaded image as it's loaded, but within a transaction.

L10N rework

Big thanks also go to Antoni Bella Pérez, who put a lot of work on reworking the localizable stings in KPA, fixed a lot of errors, added contexts and made the whole thing follow KDE's I18N guidelines better.

Thanks to everybody involved

Here's an alphabetically sorted list of people who contributed to this release.

Antoni Bella Pérez

A. Wilcox

Christophe Giboudeaux

Johannes Zarl-Zierl

Pino Toscano

Robert Krawitz

Tobias Leupold

Yuri Chornoivan

Thanks for all the work!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.3 released

20 Jan 2018 14:19 +0000

We are pleased to announce the new release 5.3 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management software!

Removal of the face management

Most notably, we sadly had to remove face detection and face recognition (for now), as the Digikam guys apparently decided to abandon libkface, the backend we used for this. It can't be built anymore with a current OpenCV release, and has been thus dropped by most (all?) distributors.

We really hope to bring back this feature in the future! But at the moment, there's no library out there doing the job and we sadly can't write our own (yet – no just kidding. None of us can do such witchcraft ;-).

KPhotoAlbum 5.2 released

The most notable new feature is the new Geo Position selection page in the browser. Using it, one can add an area on a map as a criterion for the image selection. Thanks to Matthias Füssel for the original patch!

KPhotoAlbum 5.1 released

20 Dec 2016 18:14 +0000

We are very pleased to announce the new release KPhotoAlbum 5.1. The following things are new:

Changes on the face management

Using the face detection and face recognition ourselves, we sadly had to realize that the current state of the implementation is not really suitable for productive use. The detector finds some faces, but only the straight-up front ones, and some not. The recognizer recognizes some person, but in most of the cases, it's not correct.

In our defense, it's not our code that doesn't do the job really good, it Digikam's libkface that we use. What we wrote is just what's necessary to use it. We can't rant about libkface though, because we can't do it better.

However, there does not seem to be an Open Source face detection and face recognition library that works really good. So we reluctantly decided that, at this time, the whole face thing is simply not suited for public consumption, yet. We really hope that this will change in the future.

We did not remove the code, but we did "hide" it behind a cmake flag. The default build will not compile the face management code anymore. If you want it, you have to set the ENABLE_PLAYGROUND flag. So either, it's up to you to decide if you want it or not (if you use a distribution like Gentoo), or it's up to your distributor.

Better area tagging workflow

If we don't use face detection anymore at the moment, we should at least be able to tag areas manually in a fast and convenient way. We thus implemented a new feature: a small dialog popping up after an area is drawn. Using it, the tag to be associated to the area can be entered at once, without further clicks or mouse moves.

We think that this offers a nice and fast way to draw and tag areas, and we hope that you like it, too :-)

KPhotoAlbum 5.0.1 released

What's new

Version 5.0.1 builds against the new KDE Frameworks libraries and uses Qt5. It does not depend on kde4libssupport, so it's a "real" KF5 program. All depreceated code has be reworked to match the current recommendations.

It's feature-complete, meaning everything that our KDE4/Qt4 version could do has been ported and works (again).

It has been quite a long time since our last release, which also means that a lot of testing has been done. It should be safe to use KPA 5.0.1 (at least, it didn't eat my database ;-), but it should still be considered a bit beta-ish due to the lack of a large number of users having tested it out.

5.0.1?!

The version number seems a bit odd (as we skipped 5.0.0). Here's why: at first, this was intended to be a beta release. We tagged one (5.0-beta1), but found severe bugs shortly after, so we decided to withdraw it. Later, we tagged another one (5.0-beta2), but our tag name didn't match the version names suggested by the KDE folks. So we tagged another one (5.0.0) just to find out the KF5 release scripts wouldn't work with our automatic versionning infrastructure anymore. So we had to tag another one, and thats is 5.0.1, because tags are permanent and the version number had to be increased each time ;-)

Thanks to everybody involved

The main (porting) work has been done (as usual) by Johannes Zarl-Zierl. But of course also many thanks to everybody else who has put work in this release and contributed code and/or bugreports! The git log prints out the following individuals who have pushed code: